Google Drops Expeditions App, Brings VR Tours to Arts and Culture

Another from Google virtual reality companies bites the dust. The company says it is end of support for its VR educational app, Expeditions, next year, although it will fare much better than Google’s Daydream VR platform. Instead of completely stopping shipments, Google is integrating many of the app’s functions into its Arts & Culture app.

It feels like there is life, when every tech company and their mom jumped on the VR bandwagon, but again 2020 has made time a big mess. Google launched expeditions in 2015 for his VR cardboard headset, a cheap VR smartphone adapter made from literal cardboard, and marketed the app as a classroom aid for “virtual excursions” long before covid-19 became a thing.

Google said in a blog post Friday that it will no longer support the Expeditions app and plans to remove it from the iOS and Android app stores after June 30, 2021. Many of the app’s virtual apps visits will migrate to Google’s Arts & Culture app, according to Director of Corporate Education Programs Management Jennifer Holland. She framed the decision as a response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has brought many workplaces and schools around the world online.

“As schools around the world are reinventing education from scratch for a hybrid world, we’ve also been thinking deeply about how to adjust our tools to respond to the moment and simultaneously build for the future,” said Holland writes. “We have heard and recognized that immersive experiences with VR headsets are not always accessible to all learners and even more so this year as the transition to blended learning has posed challenges for schools to use Expeditions effectively. “

Google Arts & Culture already offers many other VR and AR experiences (like this tool for shoot your selfie in a famous work of art) as well as museum collections from over 2,000 cultural institutions, so it seems natural for the Expeditions repertoire. You can use the Cardboard viewer for some of the content in the Arts & Culture app, but don’t be surprised if that option ends up quietly disappearing. Google has been distancing itself from virtual reality for a while now. He unplugged his Daydream headset last year and open source the software behind Cardboard soon after. With Expeditions now on the chopping block, Google’s headset doesn’t seem long for this world.